The Final Descent of Black Lives Matter

After a decision filled with reverse symbolism, the heyday of cultural Marxism has mercifully ended.

It has been a time of reckoning for the far left that held sway over the country for four long, miserable years. While plentiful evidence abounds that the nation is coming to its senses and re-embracing traditional American values, nothing better epitomized and cleared the path to the sinkhole into which the country descended than Black Lives Matter (BLM). But following a powerfully symbolic act last week, the BLM era has all but officially crashed and burned.

That Awful Summer of 2020

Few will ever forget what happened to the nation following the death of George Floyd on May 25, 2020. In the twinkling of an eye, a racial reckoning overtook the culture. White Americans were forced to apologize for their whiteness and bend the knee to the self-proclaimed morally superior radicals declaring the country systemically and irredeemably racist. Calls to defund the police were unhesitatingly embraced by Democratic politicians. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi convinced her leftist colleagues to get on their knees in the US Capitol. Even the quintessential establishment Republican Mitt Romney marched in the streets demanding social justice.

Anyone daring to challenge the newfound supremacy of the radical left was shouted down, disgraced, and canceled.  Long-standing historical monuments were toppled. Conservative speech was branded inherently racist. The mass of once-liberal universities evolved into full-blown cultural Marxism. School curricula were hastily revised to reflect the new paradigm embodied by left-wing critical race theory (CRT) and the 1619 Project, which declared that the nation was founded for the distinct purpose of advancing slavery.

Heading the revolt was the previously little-known group Black Lives Matter. In a few short weeks, BLM, founded after the Trayvon Martin affair in 2014, was showered with a whopping $90 million in contributions, largely from suddenly guilt-ridden institutions and organizations. It seemed not to matter that BLM’s founder, Patrisse Cullors, was a self-avowed “trained Marxist.” And in the most symbolically representative sign of the times, a public square adjacent to the White House was renamed Black Lives Matter Plaza, complete with a massive BLM mural emblazoned on the street. In a famously leftist city with a large black population, it seemed that name would become permanent, standing as a reminder of the troubled, pandemic- and violence-ridden days of yore.

The Rapid Descent of Black Lives Matter

As his first term was ending, President Donald Trump had called the words “Black Lives Matter” a “symbol of hate” and CRT “toxic propaganda.” Shortly after Trump’s second inauguration, Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-GA) introduced a bill proposing to withhold millions of dollars in federal funding from DC if it did not remove the massive BLM mural and change the name to “Liberty Plaza.” And now, Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser has bowed to that demand, removing all signs and symbols of BLM from that plaza.

BLM contributions dropped to less than $5 million by 2023, but things had begun falling apart at the seams for the group by 2021 following revelations that Cullors spent millions on luxury homes in Los Angeles — estimated at $6 million — and Georgia and then resigned as executive director of Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation. Federal filings from 2020 to 2022 show just a third of the $90 million raised in 2020 went to other charitable organizations, with $22 million going to expenses, including $1.6 million to Cullors’ father for “security services” and $2.1 million to a BLM board member for “consulting.” That year, a rapper named Zuby stated, “This organization has been capitalizing off of unfortunate deaths and tragedies and guilt-tripping people into sending them lots of money and donations, which I believe most people think is going to go to a good cause and instead they are paying themselves six and seven figure salaries.”

As BLM Plaza was being dismantled, an additional nail in the BLM coffin was delivered last week by another popular rapper, Lil Yachty, who declared that BLM “was literally a scam” on an episode of Quenlin Blackwell’s YouTube show.

Lamentations on the Left

The New York Times lamented as workers “used a jackhammer and a pickax to tear up a mural that read ‘Black Lives Matter,’ painted on the road during the long hot summer of 2020. The symbolism was potent.” That plaza was “spiritual,” Selwyn Jones, an uncle of George Floyd, told the NYT. “But them taking the time to destroy it, that’s making a statement, man … like we don’t care.” Sonny Hostin, far-left co-host of The View added that removing the mural was part of a “continuation of the erasure of American history.”

The reason we can call this the fall instead of the death of the BLM movement is that the radicals succeeded to a stunning degree in infiltrating mainstream institutions with their “anti-racism” gospel. It was insufficient to simply not be racist. One would have to prove it by taking action in one’s life to join the bandwagon. Even as DEI programs are canceled far and wide, Black Lives Matter Plaza is bulldozed, the BLM brand is disgraced by a prominent black hip-hop artist, and a growing number of educational, cultural, and commercial institutions roll back the wild excesses of the BLM era, the residue remains. How long it will last is a decidedly open question.